What R U Thankful 4?

                I teach Sunday school at Mill Creek Parish United Methodist Church in Derwood.  Currently, I am one of the teachers for the 4^th- and 5^th-graders, including my son, Matt. One of my teacher duties is to put up the November bulletin board in the hallway, which I am working on. The subject is, because of Thanksgiving, of course, “What R U Thankful 4?” So I've been thinking about that. The last two weeks I have so much to be thankful for myself, particularly in the cancer department, that I should at least mention them here.

                --In the course of my recent reconstruction surgery, they did routine biopsies of everything. The results came back yesterday, and they are all clear. Yay!

                --I survived the first of what I hope will be many years’ worth of boob MRIs. Should have the results back soon. I am thankful for not freaking out, because I didn’t realize it would involve 20 minutes in a closed MRI tube. If I had realized that was going to happen, I would have asked for a  Xanax or Valium or something. I am claustrophobic, and this was about all I could handle. But I made it through without totally freaking out, though I was close to tears when they got me out and I was shaky for a while. When I got out of there, I drove straight to the Lindt chocolate store for some life-affirming truffles. Yay!

                --The boobs continue to heal and readjust just fine. I am so glad I decided to do the reconstruction! I impressed my trainer yesterday very much by demonstrating that, in fact, I still have nearly complete freedom of motion both my shoulders, which we had thought was going to be an issue.  I am allowed to go back to light exercise at the gym now, but no weights for another couple of weeks. Yay on all counts!

                --This whole exercise has provided numerous opportunities for completely embarrassing and horrifying my children. Always gratifying.

                Example:  In the carpool line, someone shouts to me, “Hey, haven’t seen you in more than a week!  Where you been?” 

                And I shout back out the minivan window, “Oh, I was getting my new boobs!  They turned out great!” 

                Julia and Matt sink into their chairs in abject horror.

                 “Mom, you can’t DO that!  You can’t shout the word ‘boobs’ in public like that!”

                “Well, I just did. Do it again, if you want.”

                Wish I had it on film.

                --Meanwhile, all the Pinktober hullaballoo has encouraged various friends and relatives to go and get their mammograms, Pap tests, etc. Thank you!  One who had a suspicious situation was found to have nothing scary or alarming going on.  Yay!

                --Last weekend, my friend, Steve, who is our school athletic director and my daughter’s soccer coach, and who himself has been battling lymphoma for several years-- including a bone marrow transplant and everything that goes with that--was well enough to run a 5k!   Yay!

                --Also last week, that same man, along with Julia and her whole soccer team, played a game with two pink soccer balls of Awareness.  I was hanging around waiting for them after the game; I wanted my daughter to take a photo of me with one of the pink soccer balls, because all this Pinkness amuses me. But after the game, while the girls were still in their huddle, they all signed the ball and called me over and gave me the game ball and said kind words about my "warrior spirit."  Coming from Steve, who had just battled back from a bone marrow transplant, and from my daughter and her friends, some of whom had pink ribbons in their hair, this completely made me fall apart.  I cried all over the place. A very cool moment.  Thanks, guys!

Thanks to my friend, Kathleen McKay, for the photos!

                

Reconstruction progress!

                I wanted to update you on my main reconstruction surgery, which happened almost two weeks ago now.  Time flies when you are taking drugs! Seriously, though, I stopped taking the drugs pretty fast.  The pain just wasn’t that bad, and the drugs made me think I had scorpions in my hair. I am now back to the occasional Advil and a glass of wine, and am scorpion-free. It’s sore, but nothing I can’t handle. Getting my last wisdom tooth out was a whole lot worse. I was worried about getting some sort of terrible post-op infection or something, which one of my friends did following her reconstruction, but everything went fine.  Thank you all for your prayers!

                The day I was diagnosed with cancer back in March 2011, or maybe the day after, a friend of mine who did this whole miserable trip a couple years ahead of me told me they can work miracles with the plastic surgery, nowadays.  Of all the things I could be worrying about, she said, I shouldn’t worry about my physical appearance at the end of the day, because they could fix it.  In fact, she told me, if we weren’t at a P.T.A. meeting at that moment, which we were, she would whip them out and show me just how happy the girls could be in the end!  I replied that was not necessary, I could take her word for it, but I was very, very encouraged to hear it.  In later months, I hung onto her words and would tell myself, things might look pretty atrocious right now, but we are going to fix them.

                Well, fix them we did.  Or, at least we are well on our way.  I had outpatient surgery on Sept. 19.  The surgery took about three hours. On the right side, where I had the mastectomy, they replaced the temporary “tissue expander” with a regular old implant.  The other side, they just reduced and hoisted everything up to the same level as the other one.

                I am amazed at how much better things look and feel already. The tissue expander felt pretty much like a cannon ball in there, or maybe a duckpin bowling ball.  The new implant feels like you would want a breast to feel.  Yay! The metal parts are gone, so I can now have my regular M.R.I. to make sure nothing wacky is growing in there. And my boob will no longer set off the T.S.A. metal detectors when I get on an airplane, which will be nice to never have to explain to a T.S.A. man again.

                I am awestruck by the artistry of my surgeon, Dr. Kathy Huang.  She had to visualize where the one side would end up after one kind of procedure, and then imagine where the other side ought to end up, following a completely different procedure, and then execute.  And she did!  The symmetry she achieved is more than I had hoped for.  Oh, it all still looks pretty terrible, because of bruising and swelling and stitches and such.  So don’t worry about me posting any embarrassing inappropriate photos here anytime soon. But I can see where it is all headed, and it is headed toward a good place.

                Recently, a photographer called David Jay has promoted something called The SCAR Project.  He makes beautiful portraits of young women with breast cancer, scars and all.  The portraits are very powerful and many are very beautiful. But I was struck, reading the online comments people have left on some of them, by how much some people were put off by the scars.  Some of the saddest comments came from women, and there was one that horrified me, from a woman who said she would rather die of breast cancer than have her body scarred like that. It broke my heart that she thought those were her only two options. They are not. I want people to know that.

                Anybody that is reading this who is facing breast cancer themselves, or in their family, know this:  you can ask your plastic surgeon to see some of his or her before-and-after pictures.  They should have a portfolio of them to show you. Or, in a few months, I will have some of my own that I would be willing to share if it would help.  Yes, you can look decent again.

                Now, I have two more “procedures” to go.  In a few months, they install a nipple on there.  How this works, I do not know, but it sounds like it involves human embroidery, or a combination of embroidery and  origami?  They have promised to knock me out again so I don’t have to watch whatever they do. 

                A few months later still, the other procedure involves a tattoo artist. It might also involve a bunch of wine, on my part, or maybe worse. My brother tells me that traditionally, you get drunk and then decide to get a tattoo, not the other way around.  But I do not personally want to be mentally present while they stick needles in me, repeatedly, in my nipple, for God’s sake. As it happens, when you have a mastectomy, there comes a point on the morning of the surgery when they have to inject you with radioactive isotopes so they can find all your lymph nodes. Unfortunately, they have to do this several times, right in your nipple, with absolutely no pain medication because that interferes with the way things flow. They don’t tell you about this in advance, because it hurts like hell and they know it, and they can’t do anything about that. Those were probably the most painful physical moments of this whole stupid process, for me, so far.  So, when I get tattooed, I plan to be comfortably numb, one way or another. Negotiations continue on this point.

                I do get to start doing limited, non-bouncy forms of exercise today.  Yay!  It will be another couple of weeks before I can do weights or run.  But we’re getting there!

 My plastic surgeon, who is an artist and a genius, Dr. Kathy Huang